Why Your SMC Trading Is Inconsistent (And How To Fix It)

So, you've traded SMC for a while now, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and you're not really sure why. The problem is not that you don't understand the concepts. The problem is that you're applying them in the wrong order, and you don't have a structured, systematic approach. So, in this video, I'm going to share my exact strategy with you on a trade that I just took about 24 hours ago. So, I'm going to share all of the details in this step by step. And trust me when I tell you, it's incredibly simple, and you will have some serious aha moments if you stick around to the end of this video. So, my name is Justin Bennett, full-time trader and founder of Daily Price Action. As always, all of this is my opinion only and not financial advice. So, looking at the EuroUSD here on the 4hour time frame. So, I made a video about 24 hours ago talking about this exact setup. So, I wanted to flip on the camera and share with you the exact strategy, okay? Full transparency, showing everything exactly how I trade these markets. Now, if you also want more details than what I'm going to provide in this video, I have a free SMC course that's nearly two hours of content that you will not find here on YouTube going into all of the details um from SMC basics all the way down to my exact strategy. So, check that out here on the screen. It is 100% free. If you don't see it here on the screen, check out the description of this video or the pinned comment. Okay? And by the way, beyond that, too, you will have a chance to join us in Discord if you want. And this trade that I'm about to show you, I did announce in real time in Discord. So, uh, here it is right here announcing it about 24 hours ago where I announced my entry, my stop loss, and my take-profit. So, this is exactly what I'm about to show you, how I did this, why I did this in this video. All right, so Euro USD 4hour time frame. If you follow me for a while now, um, which if you're not subscribed, you should because I'm putting out videos like this every single day, you can see that this descending channel here has provided a few opportunities over the past really couple of months. So, we have this downtrend here, lower highs and lower lows. And I love using channels like this because not only does this provide me with an area to look for entries, but it also provides me with areas to look for areas to potentially take profit on the way down. Now, in this case here, okay, there were a few things happening and I want to, you know, describe them in detail, but all of them are incredibly simple cuz one thing you'll notice in this video is that we're basically using the same exact concept over and over and over again across different time frames. And that's what makes this work. So the very first thing we have to understand here on the 4hour time frame is that we do have this breakup structure back here. So we had the low down here. We had the market come up here sweep internal liquidity give us that external high. This became external once we had the BOS over here. Okay. So once we had this here we could label this external knowing that this high up here is the one that as long as we're below this technically the euro is bearish. Okay. That's all we need to know. There's no guessing games here in terms of well is this a bottom? Is it not a bottom? Because look, as long as we're below here, guys, this market is technically bearish. Okay, that's all I need to know here. Now, the next thing that we can do is looking down here going to the hourly time frame. Look at this price action back here following the BOS. Okay, so this right here told us that sellers remain in control. However, since this point down here, what you can see is we had higher highs and higher lows. So, once you have a BOS like this, guys, this is not the setup. Okay, this is not what you want to be shorting over here. Because if you're shorting this, then you're obviously shorting low. What you want to wait for is the market to move into premium. We find premium by taking the external high up here down here to this low and marking it out like this. Okay, so these are my my fib settings here. I'll throw this up here so you guys can copy it. Um, very simple. All this is is just a fib retracement in Trading View that I have modified. Okay. So once we have this, everything basically above this 50% line, everything up here is fair game. Now when I say fair game, what I'm looking for there is a change of character. And in this case, it was a little bit harder to identify just because we had these larger swings from the market. And what you'll notice is that through here, the market got very volatile. Okay? So it's very difficult to to identify a lower time frame shift when you have swings that are this wide. Okay? So in this case here, what I did instead is I waited for this over here. Now, I want to point out too, guys, I I do actually want to say that I did have a short position on through here that would have worked out. I closed it at break even uh just because of this volatility that we had back here. I wasn't too comfortable with this and also the fact that the market went sideways uh during this time and I just didn't love the price action up here at the time. However, that would have worked out nicely with this drop right here. So, that would have actually been profitable. Well, that was another trade I had on based on a flip here that we got on the lower time frames. Now, that aside though, what you can see here is that if we take this high up here, okay, and again, recall what I said about using the same concept over and over again. That's all we're doing. Very simple stuff off of this high up here, all you do is walk the market up. Okay? So, BOS back here, right? This down here becomes your external low or protected low in this case, right? We have the high up here. We have a BOS above this. That makes this down here the low to watch, right? All we're doing is the same thing over and over again. Now, what you'll notice is that over here, we did get acceptance below this low. So, this low right here following this BOS, this internal BOS, we had acceptance below here. That meant that this right here was a change of character. It also meant that looking for shorts up here in premium also made sense once again. Okay, so it's the same concept over and over again, guys. There's not a bunch of different concepts to learn here. Um and then what you'll notice is that over here once again from this high up here down here to the low you can see that we are well within premium. So basically this line right here is my 50%. Anything above here is fair game to look for shorts. Okay. And this is exactly what I did about 24 hours ago to get short on this market uh which is currently in profit. So to show you exactly what I did, this is all I did here. I had this area marked out above 50%. Now, what you'll notice too is that from this larger structure, because clearly this market has been sideways for a while now, from this larger structure, this high up here down here to the low, what you'll notice is that this here of this larger range, the 50% line is basically the same. So, I know that the moment that we get above this line right here that I'm looking for shorts. Now, what I'm specifically looking for is, spoiler alert, it's the same exact concept, right? I'm just looking for a shift here on the 15-minut time frame. So, all I'm doing is just walking this market up just like we do every single time. All I'm doing is if this is my high that just broke, I'm looking at this low right here. If we break this high, I'm looking at this low right here. If we break this high, I'm looking at this low right here. And this low is the one that I pointed out in the video 24 hours ago. So, specifically what I did here, okay, and I'm going to remove this line right here just so that we don't get confused. That's my 50%. I know we're well in into premium here, so I know that shorts are fair game. Okay. So, this is the structure shift here on the 15-minute time frame. So, all this is guys is what I call an internal BOS. Okay? And this is internal just because this is all internal obviously to the 4hour chart and the 1 hour chart that we just looked at. Okay? So, you can see that the IBOS here is, you know, very very tiny. This little shift here that we we saw is very small in comparison to this overall chart, right? So, just very simple. we had a BOS above this high which meant that this down here was the protected low. In other words, this was the low right here that buyers had to protect to keep this short-term uptrend intact. Okay, so for me, when I'm looking at this here, I know that everything above that 50% is fair game. However, I need confirmation that the top is likely in. That confirmation doesn't occur until we get a structure shift on the 15-minut time frame. Okay, so right here on this close, if I drag this over, what you'll notice is that the market did close below here. Now, let me explain something too that trips up a lot of traders. And I saw a comment like this in yesterday's video telling me that this was not a change of character because it was very slight. Now, if we look at this, if I move all the way in here, let's take a look at this in terms of pips. Okay, how far below this low back here did we close? So, from this line down here to the close, you can see it was about 2.3 pips. Okay, so less than three pips. And what traders tend to do is they overthink this and they say, "Okay, well that's not a change of character because it's not convincing enough. It was only about two pips. You know, it's not convincing enough." Guys, this is all you need. Okay, this is all you need. This right here was a valid change of character. And this isn't just a matter I want to be very clear about this, too, that we're not just taking this and and going into a chart for the first time, dropping to a 15-minute or 5 minute chart, and looking for a change of character. I can promise you that if you do that, you are going to lose. This strategy works because of confluence because we are stacking time frames in our favor. Okay, we are narrowing down the area of interest down to a very small area where we are looking for shorts. Okay, so for instance, in this case, we knew or I knew that I was looking for shorts right up here. Okay, this very small area right here. I wasn't just dropping into this chart and just randomly looking for, you know, trades anywhere on the chart, right? I knew that this area right here was where I wanted to do business. Okay? And that is why when you go to a 15-minute time frame, even if something doesn't look super convincing, right? Even if you don't get the market giving you this massive drop below here, okay, this right here that we saw was enough. Okay? All you need is acceptance below this low over here because again, that was the protected low following this internal BOS. Okay? Now, my short entry occurred right through here. Okay? I actually waited on this a little bit because we did have this imbalance back here. So, I was waiting on this and this was again shared in real time in in Discord for VIP members. So, my entry was here, stop loss above the highs. My target is much lower down. However, I might uh at least exit part of this or maybe the whole thing going into the weekend just because of of you know, current events out there. Uh if you're watching this video shortly after I publish it, you know what I'm talking about. But the bottom line here, guys, I wanted to flip this on again to show you exactly what I do here over and over again. And you can take this and go a few layers deep with it if you want to. I mean, you can call this here internal BOS, internal change of character, looking for that shift over here. Again, same thing on the 15-minute time frame. And so, it's just the same concept over and over again, guys. And once you kind of understand that, the light bulb should start to go off because really, it's just a matter of doing the same thing on the 1 hour/4our time frame, dropping down to a 15-minut time frame. And also, even the daily, guys, I've shown this before, too. This right here, same exact concept. BOS right here above this high. This was our external low. We had the market pull back, give us this low here. We took out this high over here. Meaning this was a change of character following the acceptance below. So this two was also bearish on the daily. So you can see here we have bearish on the daily. We have bearish on the 4hour time frame. We have bearish on the 1 hour time frame. Bearish on the 15-minut time frame. So you don't have to use four time frames like that. I'm just showing you this because you can take this concept and you can go three layers deep, four layers deep, even five layers deep if you wanted to. You don't have to, but you can see how once you do that, you do get very high probability setups just like this one that occurred here about 24 hours ago. So, you know, currently from my entry uh which was up here in this region down here to current uh rates, it's about 55 pips or so. It was a little bit uh more than that, around 80 pips. Uh but we'll see how this goes over the coming days. I'm not showing you this to to show that this is guaranteed to work out, but I'm showing you this to explain exactly why I did what I did here over the past 24 hours. And the beautiful thing about this too, this very simple SMC strategy is that you can apply this to any market out there as long as you have enough liquidity in the market. Um, so don't apply it to some obscure micro cap stock or some altcoin. Uh but as long as you're on things like the euro, any of the major currency pairs, uh the indices out there, S&P 500, Dow, NASDAQ, you know, Bitcoin, even Ethereum, you know, or gold, things like that. As long as you're on those kind of markets, this is going to work. So again, check out the free SMC course right here on the screen. That's going to give you a ton of detail on how I trade SMC in addition to what you just learned. And then beyond that, you will have a chance to join us in Discord if you choose. All right. So, until next time, trade well and I will talk to you again